Chicago-born writer Jill Soloway directs first feature film

Jill Soloway, via imdb.com

After Chicago-born Jill Soloway and her sister wrote and staged The Real Live Brady Bunch at Chicago’s Annoyance Theatre in 1992 (it starred Jane Lynch, among others), showbiz types started paying attention.

Over the years, the Emmy-nominated Soloway has written scores of episodes for several television shows — Nikki, Six Feet Under, Grey’s Anatomy, Dirty Sexy Money (with showrunner Craig Wright) and Diablo Cody’s The United States of Tara (also with Wright).

Her feature film directorial debut, which she also wrote, opens August 30 and is called Afternoon Delight — a favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Rife with frankly sexual moments from a female point of view, its tone is what Soloway jokingly described to the New York Times as “funcomfortable.”

“I’d sort of gotten to that place in my career where HBO or Showtime or somebody would find the next young thing and be like, ‘Jill will help you,’ ” she told the Times. “I was a little bit like those songwriters who have to write and produce songs for, like, the 21-year-old versions of themselves. And I kind of felt like I had missed my boat. It was fun to write, but definitely the feeling of, like, if the show ever wins an Emmy, I will not be the one up there, waving it in the air. I will be in the audience.”